No beach, no bunny, no bloody patience

to be sung to the tune of King Of The Road 🙂

My Mum has apparently been ill for day although I didn’t actually learn about this until Friday. She was well enough however to go out yesterday 😆 so when I spoke to her last night she was adamant she was seeing us today and asked me to think of something for us all to do. Ady is working and as everywhere is heaving along the coast I would have probably chosen some sort of walk somewhere (Dad doesn’d do beaches 🙂 ) but she rang (‘first thing’ – 10am?) and suggested us all going round to my Granny’s taking some lunch with us. I suggested picking her up after she’d done her regular pilgrimage to Sainsburys – honestly, the woman goes there daily! as I didn’t want to drag the children round the supermarket but she was adamant she needed me incase she had to lean on someone to make it round every aisle (she is very weak apparently!) so I arranged to be over at her house in half an hour. She asked me to make it 45 minutes as she wasn’t dressed yet. I would like to pretend that it was going to take her 45 minutes to get ready to leave the house because she was so ill she needed to move slowly but actually my mother is utterly incapable of getting out of a house quickly anyway – Dad always says she perish in a fire because she’d still be checking the gas was off, the TV unplugged and reapplying her lipstick while everyone else was assembled on the other side of the road and the fire brigade were already tackling the blaze! 😆

So I finished making the blown eggs with the children – Davies had some stickers and little plastic chassis with wheels on to make vehicles and Tarly had some 3D stickers of flowers, bugs and butterflies to stick on hers, got us all dressed and put away 2 baskets of clean washing before heading over to my parents. The plan had been for D&S to go in their house and wait with my Dad while Mum and I went to Sainsburys but Tarly refused insisting she wanted to come with me so in the end we all went. Well actually we didn’t – there was a queue off the main road just to get onto the slip road just to get into the car park so I decided that on my deathbed I’d kick myself for having wasted about an hour of my life in such circumstances so I swept across 3 lanes and we changed direction to go to the CoOp in the town centre which is just never, ever busy instead. Indeed it was not busy, we got all the bits we needed for lunch and went to my Granny’s.

Now as regular readers will know my Granny annoys me frequently. She is my Mum’s mum and they are very alike and have a real love/hate relationship with each other which I have always strived to keep well out of. She is big on emotional blackmail and guilt trips and used to make me feel very uncomfortable as a small child by gushing over me almost non stop while pretty much ignoring my brother. She is always bordering on rude to my Dad, which he is big enough to rise above but pisses me off and does that really annoying thing of talking to people through the children. I love that the children see one of their great grandparents – they are light on relatives generally with only my Mum and Dad for Grandparents and only Granny as a great grandparent so I am keen to foster that and I think they get lots out of the stories of when Granny was a little girl, let alone the stories of when Mummy was a little girl but I recall spending time with her when I was little and her ‘feeding’ me and Frazer with things which we’d then talk to my parents about – lots of snidey little comments. She is just not a nice person to be around for long periods of time and very neatly fits the mould of a bitter old woman left alone because she was horrible to people who tried to care about her. Anyway. I’d said to my Mum that I wouldn’t put up with any nonsense from her today so at least twice I pulled her up on some rubbish she was saying to the children which was putting me in a generally grumpy mood.

We got there and as soon as we arrived we went into her garden where there was an ENORMOUS box with a MASSIVE red remote control car (a quick google reveals it to be this exact one) for Davies. He was utterly overwhelmed, as indeed I would expect him to be – way too extravagent a gift for no particular reason and given with no real explanation other than ‘it’s been here waiting for you to come to my house and see me, but it’s been so long’ FFS don’t put that on a 6yo and don’t entice them to visit you with the sort of gift they wouldn’t normally even get for their birthday! It took about 15 minutes and a screwdriver to liberate it from it’s packaging only to discover it needed to be on charge for 5 hours before first use which sort of diffused it a bit thankfully. Then, almost as an afterthought Scarlett was taken into the house and presented with a giant polar bear soft toy. She did a grand job of being grateful but said quietly to me ‘Granny shouldn’t have bought me a soft toy really, I have already got lots’ bless her. It did seem rather incomparable a gift and perpetuates that favouritism that both Granny and my Mum have demonstrated moving down the generations – both of them utterly dote on Davies and largely ignore Tarly, openly describing her as ‘difficult’ 🙄

There were further fractious moments over lunch but I tried really hard to be reasonable and rational and spent a lot of time just talking to one or other child or my Dad. Scarlett and I did some drawing and writing together (I’d got both children to pack a small bag with some stuff to take with them as I knew there’d be no toys there and they’d both chosen to take a notebook and some pens). Tarly is doing this ‘pretend writing’ thing at the moment where she’ll draw loads of lines and shapes on a page and then tell me what it says. She wrote me a message and read it out ‘to Mummy, you are so pretty and I love you so much, lots and lots of love from Scarlett’ which she got all giggly about reading out and finished with a big kiss – made me melt :). I then drew some pictures – a cat, a house and a fairy and wrote the words out for her to join to the pictures. She didn’t just draw a line between them, instead she copied my writing next to each picture. A bit later on Davies and I played noughts and crosses, then a version Davies made up with H’s and A’s instead and a bigger board, then boxes and then as I couldn’t think of any other pen and paper games other than battleships – too long or hangman – requires reading / writing skills. So I wrote out some sums for him which he did instead. I totally expected him to scoff and not want to but he’s been doing lots of chatting about numbers generally lately so he took that really happily and sat doing them. I popped to the loo with Tarly while he was still working on them and when I came back out Mum had taken over and written a few more for him too – hopefully she didn’t make too much of it and ruin his interest.

We left there at about 4pm, dropped Mum and Dad home and came home. Davies played some xbox and Tarly did some more drawing before tea. Ady got home and while he was brushing Tarly’s hair before bed (honestly the new hairbrush has changed her life, she is up for having it brushed as often as one of us will do it :shock:!) he told her that I had a tool which could ‘engrave’ her name in it which of course meant she wanted it done there and then. So he dug out my pyrography burner and I burnt her name and some flowers onto her hairbrush, which then meant Davies wanted something burnt onto something too so I burnt his name and (quel surprise!) a Gromit face on the back of his wooden chair. I would probably have carried on quite happily but I leant across the machine and singed a load of my hair which meant I had to call a halt to it so I could go and wash the stink out of it. I’d forgotten how nice a craft it is though so I might resurrect it again as I already have the kit. 🙂